December 11, 2012

over a year after the 0.7.3 release, we are proud and excited to announce the release of SuperTuxKart 0.8! We have closed over 230 tickets, and made some significant changes: You can now enjoy a story mode with challenges against a stronger AI, and improved physics with better skidding and collisions. Tracks can be driven in reverse, and we have new music especially composed for SuperTuxKart.

Many many more changes were done, the main ones are:

Story mode and new challenge set

Improved AI

Skidding and better collision physics

Reverse mode

New green valley track

New Blackhill Mansion track

Updated XR591 track

Updated Fort Magma track

Updated Jungle track

Updated Sand track

New music

Updated menus

We hope you will enjoy this brand new version!

Head over to http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Downloads to download the game now! Windows and OSX binaries are already available, and Linux binaries should appear in the coming days as packagers make binaries for various distributions.

Finally, as always, don't forget that the forum and mailing list are more appropriate than blog comments for bug reports.

A big thanks to all the people who have contributed to SuperTuxKart,
without whom this release would not have been possible (full list in
the credits of the game).

59 comments:

Thanks for this release - but it's disappointing that nobody seems to have listened to me about the texture problems. Every new release, I have to go through every track and replace/re-size the faulty textures.

I don't have a forum account (and no useable email to get account), so I reported it in the blogs.

As I mentioned in the RC1 blog entry, all textures that have sizes that are not power of two are invisible and/or cause graphical corruption. It doesn't take much to fix these textures - and I'd even supply the fixed textures myself if necessary. I just don't see why this problem is being ignored.

I KNOW the blog is not appropriate for bug reports. See my explanation of why I posted here. If I could post in the forum without creating an account, I would.

Do you see where the previous blog said "Please help us test this release to make SuperTuxKart 0.8 a great release!" Well, that's what I was trying to do by posting the problem. I was trying to HELP. Every Mac PPC user will have the same display problems. You don't want me to report problems and tell you the solution to the problems? Screw it then.

What is silly is stating you are fixing it after the fact every release and then keep the fixes for yourself and still complaining that we aren't fixing it for you.

PPC Macs are no longer supported by its own manufacturer, yet you expect us to fix problems with it? Just submit your patches, and we will include them if they work as intended. Remember this is all volunteer work and if you want something fixed, ask nicely (as you did) and don't complain (as you did) if we are late and at the same time say it's easy to fix but don't take the time to submit them for review. That's pretty bass-ackwards, if you ask me.

When I discovered the problem, I reported it. When it wasn't fixed, I fixed it myself. I assumed that whoever made the track & textures would feel possessive and not want others to modify their stuff, so I waited for an "offical fix" - and kept reporting the problem. If I knew my texture fixes would have been accepted, I definitely would have submitted them.

I was not complaining - merely saying I was disappointed that my problem reports were ignored. I don't "expect" you to support PPC. I am grateful that PPC is supported. But it's silly to support an architecture, then ignore bug reports from users of that architecture and not care about the game looking horribly buggy when a simple texture size change will fix the problem.

(Note - I am NOT saying the game is buggy, just that it looks like a mess when the textures are screwed up.)

Anonymous: I'm really sorry for being so rude; I should not have tried to blame you in any way. It is a problem, and unfortunately it didn't get enough attention this time around. Hopefully for next release everything will work fine for you. :)

Really great that you managed to release 0.8 before Christmas - it will be a nice christmas gift for my younger brothers. They love playing SuperTuxKart against each others!Thank you for your great work!

Anonymous: we have fixed several non-POT textures. Sorry we couldn't fix them all in time. But the situation is, if you are unable to see them, it's not only because your GPu doesn't support them. It's because your GPU doesn't support them *and* your driver tells us, at the same time, that they are. So unfortunately this is primarily a case of broken driver

it might be that those games automatically re-size all textures. Irrlicht (sensibly) does this only if the driver reports that it does not support non-power-of-two textures. But anyway, if you could just send us the scaled images (which in case of jpgs MUST be based on the lossless versions in our media repository), we will try to fix this.

may i suggest a little improvement:1. less bouncing balls (6 during a short lap is way too much - and you can't avoid all of them)2. a new way to get rid of a bouncing ball: hit it with the swoosher, and it bounces back to the player who threw it

first off, congratulations on the new version. I like the story mode a lot, a great game got even greater with this version.

BUT, am I the only one who finds the new version IMPOSSIBLY difficult? I'd been playing 0.73 a lot, finished all the challenges, but with 0.8, I can't even get past the first two or three challenges. To me, it's quite annoying to have most things blocked without completing the challenges and to be unable to complete the challenges.

Am I just such a novice player or has the game really gotten so much more difficult? (Btw. I am playing under ubuntu).

Yes the new AI is quite a lot harder since it actually tries to get bonuses and uses skidding quite a lot on Expert. Try playing challenges at Intermediate or Novice; now you can choose difficulty according to your skill level.

honestly, I found Expert on 0.73 quite challenging already but 0.8 harder even when choosing Normal skill. :)When trying to move on with the storyline, do I get enough points when choosing Intermediate or Novice?

Again, thanks a lot for this great game which gave me and my daughter so many happy hours and best wishes,Andy

Hi, I just came here to say THANK YOU! The game is awesome! I've been playing it since 0.6 and I get really happy every time a new release comes out, so hat's off to you guys, the latest release and it's story mode are excellent! The playability is remarkably good!

XR591 is no longer playable (nearly impossible to stay on the track). The older style XR591 was much more fun. The new skidding model is awful. How does the car do that little hop at the beginning of the skid? That's just silly. Finally, when you hit a wall, your kart goes flying in the air? Wha? Other than that, it's a pretty good game. I like that it shows the top three scores for the track/kart/level combo at the end of a race. Even with the improved AI's, I'm still able to win most races on Expert, even with 19 other karts on the track. I finished all challenges on expert in less than two hours. I did add my own grand prix of all standard tracks, just to have something to waste time every once in a while.

I'm not very good at racing, and I love this game, but because of my bad playing skills, I can't finish those challenges! I remember an old old version of that, where you could play EVERY track available... Otherwise, it's great!